20 SMALL BUSINESS IDEAS FOR SMALL TOWNS - BY BECKY MCCRAY AUTHOR OF SMALL BIZ SURVIVAL

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20 SMALL BUSINESS IDEAS FOR SMALL TOWNS - BY BECKY MCCRAY AUTHOR OF SMALL BIZ SURVIVAL
20 small business ideas
for small towns

Plus seven ways to make your own ideas

By Becky McCray
Author of Small Biz Survival
20 SMALL BUSINESS IDEAS FOR SMALL TOWNS - BY BECKY MCCRAY AUTHOR OF SMALL BIZ SURVIVAL
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The ideas you’ll find here are collected from Small Biz
Survival, the small town and rural business resource. The
ideas came from all over, inspired by comments from
friends, businesses I’ve seen, and ideas especially suited
to small towns and rural areas. They are grouped into
three broad strategies that you can use to create more
ideas that may better suit your town. At the end, you’ll
find seven more ways to creatively come up with your
own ideas. You’re invited to take any of these ideas and
prosper.

For more updated ideas, check the Rural Business Ideas
category at Small Biz Survival.

Becky McCray

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0
United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/ or send
a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite
300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
Table of Contents                                          Page 3

20 small business ideas for small towns
Strategy #1: Be uniquely local
1.    Local pride clothing
2.    Local jewelry
3.    Local photos
4.    Local photo postcards personalized with your photo
5.    Local hospitality in a family summer camp
6.    Add value through local and organic foods
7.    Cater to local outdoor sports

Strategy #2: Use what you know
8.    Create reference guides
9.    Be a tour guide in online worlds
10.   Fix things and resell
11.   Buy local items to resell in larger markets
12.   Buy global items to resell in local markets
13.   Share your skills as a taxi
14.   Paint business windows
15.   Share your space and your creativity

Strategy #3: Look at existing businesses
16.   Build a Lending Tree style market for everything
17.   Create a Netflix style exchange for business books
18.   Use memberships to support any business
19.   Leverage government contracts to build a business
20.   Target the rural market

Seven more ways to create your own small business ideas
Resource #1: Use someone else's research
1.    Use academic search engines
2.    Search open access information
3.    Search research sharing sites
4.    Search Patents Online
Resource #2: Search idea sites and feeds
5.    Monitor business idea feeds
6.    Participate in idea sites and forums
7.    Watch other business sites for ideas
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Strategy #1: Be uniquely local
Lead tainted paint, safety problems, and environmental is-
sues have created another local opportunity for all types of
products. This is a way of thinking that exists right now in
your market.

General ways to build ideas that take advantage of this trend:
Evaluate your marketing. Are you promoting the heck out
of your "localness"? It's time to start.
Be more local. Don't hide your local flavor, your accent, all
the things that make you, your company and your product
feel local. Flaunt it!
Promote the environmental benefit. Buying local products
reduces the transportation costs to the environment.
Promote your local advantages: high quality local work-
force, safety procedures, and strict standards. For once, be
glad of the regulations you must comply with, because they
help make your product more safe.

Part of surviving in a small town small business is competing
with the world. This is one trend that gives you an advan-
tage. Use it!

1. Local pride clothing
Create clothing that promotes local pride, and your place in
the state or the region. Go beyond the usual high school mas-
cot items, and promote your own local flavor. Get some
ideas from Neighborhoodies (www.neighborhoodies.com).
Expand this idea with related local pride items, like tote
bags, kids' wear, hats and visors.
Page 5

2. Local jewelry
Customize jewelry to your state or city. State of Mine
(www.stateofmine.com) uses state shapes with stones mark-
ing home towns. Extend this concept to keychains and other
jewelry items. Look for local jewelers to help with manufac-
turing.

3. Local photos
Make local photos into postcards, posters,
or mounted and framed art, as suggested by
the Photopreneur photography business
blog (http://blogs.photopreneur.com/
marketing-local/). You can target tourists,
students or other part-time residents and
visitors. The photos can be your own, or licensed from local
photographers. You can market in existing local stores, or
even create a roadside photo stand!

4. Local postcards personalized with your photo
Customize local photo postcards by adding a personal picture
of the buyer to photos of local landmarks. German company
Cosmocard (www.cosmoproducts.de/e_index.html) makes
this easy with free standing vending machines. This type of
business would be great at your local festivals, in your down-
town business area, or at the local souvenir shop.

5. Local hospitality in a family summer camp
Create a summer camp for the whole family. Take advantage
of your area's unique climate and culture. Incorporate the
local heritage. Make it special. Laura Fitton
Page 6                      20 smal l business idea s for smal l towns

(http://pistachioconsulting.com/) told me about Red Pine
Camp (www.redpinecamp.org), a success for over 75 years.
They offer camping for the whole family, with the option to
join in any of the activities planned for all ages or just relax.

6. Add value through local and organic foods
Local food and organic food are two ways to
make a more profitable small farm, restaurant,
cafe, food market, or other food business. Food
-borne illnesses have made headlines from
huge commercial production and from im-
ported foods. It's better for the environment
because of the lower transportation distances.
Local food producers of all kinds should capi-
talize on this opportunity.

If you grow produce, get certified as organic or dedicate
more acres to organic items. Focus on local markets, promot-
ing your local advantage. Develop direct marketing methods
to go direct to consumers or consumer groups. Restaurants
can seek out local partners and organic sources. If you serve
local and organic items, promote it in all your marketing.

7. Cater to local outdoor sports
Target the changes in outdoor sports. Rural small business
expert Jack Schultz (http://boomtownusa.blogspot.com) said,
"The fastest growing spectator sport in the USA is bird
watching. Geo-caching, biking, hiking and extreme water
sports are also growing in importance." Almost any type of
business could expand to cater to the new types of outdoor
sports bringing visitors to small towns.
Page 7

Strategy #2: Use what you know
You have unique experiences and skills. No one else is quite
like you. The difficulty sometimes is just stepping back to
realize what marketable information and abilities you have.
So how do you capitalize on what you know? Here are some
ideas.

8. Create reference guides
Share your knowledge with students, professionals, or people
new to your field. Laminated guides like those created by
BarCharts (www.barcharts.com) could be customized and
marketed to college bookstores, to business associations, and
directly to students. A great idea for recent students, teach-
ers, and ex-teachers.

9. Be a tour guide in online worlds
Offer guided tours of online virtual worlds,
like SynthTravels (www.synthravels.com)
used to. Share what you know about Second
Life or World of Warcraft. This is a business
or sideline you could operate from anywhere
you can get online. You could set up your
own business, or possibly sign on with an
existing firm. Consider targeting parents or business brand-
ing executives.

10. Fix things and resell
Use your skills to buy damaged items from online auction
sites, repair them, and then resell them. Specialize! Focus
Page 8                     20 smal l business idea s for smal l towns

only on items you can repair well, and that have a strong re-
sale market. Track your time, and carefully evaluate your
profit potential. Be absolutely honest about repairs when you
resell the finished items.

11. Buy local items to resell in larger markets
                       Take a local resource into a larger mar-
                       ket. Find local sources of overstocks,
                       scraps or by-products. Add some value
                       by cleaning, researching, matching or
                       improving. Then take it to a larger mar-
                       ket such as a larger city, an online auc-
                       tion, or on consignment in larger stores.
It could be something as simple as buying local garden pro-
duce to resell in big city farmers' markets.

12. Buy global items to resell in local markets
Bring your international experience to your local market by
importing hand crafts. Those who have spent significant time
in a different country and returned home, have a unique per-
spective on items that could be good sellers. To learn more
about the challenges and regulations, talk with others who
are currently in the business, such as Salvatierra
(www.salvatierraimports.com).

13. Share your skills as a taxi
Be more than a coach, be a taxi. That means to take students
and learners out of the classroom and into the culture. Author
Robert Fulgham (www.robertfulghum.com) reports that in
the world of tango, these special coaches are called taxis. In
small towns, we take our way of life for granted. Cowboys,
Page 9

fishermen, traditional musicians, crafters, farmers, and more
all have a valuable way of life. Take your guests out in the
world, and help them enjoy the deeper dimensions of the ex-
perience away from the classroom.

14. Paint business windows
If you can draw, start a business painting win-
dows of small businesses in your town. All you
need is a vehicle, paints, brushes, and some tal-
ent! An online resource for window painters is
WindowPainting.org. They have a great page of
tips to get you started, a photo gallery, a directory
of window painters, patterns and a video for sale.

15. Share your space and your creativity
Take old buildings or structures, in town or out in a rural set-
ting, and convert them for creative conference space and ar-
tistic residences. Probably an ideal project for a creative type
struggling to decide on a business. Entrepreneur Evelyn
Miller said, "There are lots of hidden assets in small towns,
including inexpensive living space, peace and quiet, and the
room to be creative." You could implement this as either a
development project or as a for-profit business.
Page 10                    20 smal l business idea s for smal l towns

Strategy #3: Look at existing businesses

Review any list or directory of existing businesses, or espe-
cially of businesses for sale. This can be something as simple
as a phone book or an online business directory. By looking
at existing business, you may find inspiration for your own
business. Several sites also list businesses for sale, and you
can also subscribe to their RSS feeds for regular updates.
Then, tear apart existing businesses to find parts of ideas that
you can adapt. Can you take an essential element and build a
new business around it?

16. Build a Lending Tree style market
Take the idea of a Lending Tree market, and run with it!
What other services can you build into a simple, easy com-
petitive market space? Every customer can identify with the
Lending Tree slogan, "When banks compete, you win!" Ap-
ply that to insurance, legal services, accounting, web design,
or any thing else you can think of. Don't have the technical
skills to build the web platform? Hire it out! Put your good
business skills to work on it! Credit C.C. Chapman
(www.cc-chapman.com) with this idea.

17. Create a Netflix style exchange
What if you could easily exchange business books? Steve
Rucinski (www.smbceo.com) suggested this idea. "You sub-
scribe, choose from a selection as many as you want, return
them when you want. Would that work for used business
books? They are like DVD's in that they are usually used
once, read in a few weeks and almost never looked at again."
Page 11

18. Use memberships to support any business
Use memberships to support your small town business. One
independent book seller using this ideas was profiled on
NPR's Marketplace (www.smallbizsurvival.com/2006/12/
idea-use-memberships-to-support-your.html).

19. Leverage government contracts
Securing government contracts can help build or support
your business, even if you are located in a rural or small
town area. Just looking at the list of products and services
requested can give you ideas. Locally, we also have a gov-
ernment contracts specialist who consults, at no charge, with
small businesses. The program is called Bid Assistance
(http://www.hptc.net/bis/bidassistance.asp). Look around
your area for training and support.

20. Target the small town market
Make small towns your tar-
get market, and rural prob-
lems your specialty. The
small town market is a
smaller market, but radi-
cally under served. Just off
the top of my head online banking, business coaching, ac-
counting, and business signs could all be targeted specifi-
cally to rural and small town markets. Dana Wallert targeted
the small towns around Lawrence, Kansas, for her virtual
assistant and website design business. Farmers Only
(www.farmersonly.com) targets rural residents for their dat-
ing site.
Page 12                    20 smal l business idea s for smal l towns

Seven more ways to create your own
small business ideas
Those 20 ideas may not have been for you, so how do you
come up with more ideas on your own? Here are two addi-
tional resources, and 7 specific tips, to inspire your creative
business thinking.

Resource #1: Use someone else's research
You don't have to invent some-
thing new. You can license re-
search done by universities and
others, and you can use ideas that
are now public domain. Where
do you dig up the research? In
very specialized search engines.

When you search the academic papers, you have to plow
through some difficult academic and legal language. But the
ideas are out there.

1. Use academic search engines
Both Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com/schhp) and
Microsoft Academic Search (http://
academic.research.microsoft.com/) offer searches of aca-
demic publications. You'll find papers relating to a wide
range of topics. Most of the ideas returned in these engines
could be licensed from their universities.
Page 13

2. Search open access information
Globally, an Open Access movement is sweeping the science
communities. The push is on to make more scientific re-
search openly available, with no restriction. One result is the
OAIster (www.oclc.org/oaister/) search for digital resources.
Despite the OA (Open Access) in its name, OAIster includes
both public domain and licensable ideas.

3. Search research sharing sites
Two research sharing resources are iBridge Network
(www.ibridgenetwork.org) in the USA and Flintbox
(www.flintbox.com) in Canada. Universities can post stan-
dardized explanations of their potentially marketable results.
Anyone can go and search the papers. Most of these are
available for license.

4. Search Patents Online
After 20 years, US patents usually expire, and the ideas be-
come public domain. You can look at patents as sources of
ideas, by searching at Google Patents (www.google.com/
patents). It is also now integrated in their Scholar academic
search that I mentioned above. Remember that most patents
never make it to the market as real products. Some just never
got funded, and some are not marketable products to begin
with.
Page 14                  20 smal l business idea s for smal l towns

Resource #2: Search idea sites and feeds
5. Monitor business idea feeds
Springwise New Business Ideas
(www.springwise.com) and Cool Business
Ideas (www.coolbusinessideas.com) offer
RSS feeds, or you can go directly to their
sites to search. You never know what busi-
ness idea they will profile. You may find an
inspiring idea, or more likely, an opportunity to license an
existing business idea from a global source. 60 Second Ideas
(http://60secondideas.typepad.com/) is now dormant, but still
has terrific ideas in their archives.

6. Participate in idea sites and forums
One forum where people publicly post ideas is Cambrian
House (www.cambrianhouse.com), at the Idea Explorer. You
could use the ideas for inspiration, a springboard to another
new idea. As an entrepreneur, you may choose to get in-
volved with the Cambrian House projects, where there is at
least a potential for money benefit.

7. Watch other business sites for ideas
Many business writers come up with occasional new ideas.
I've especially noticed business author Seth Godin
(http://sethgodin.typepad.com) freely sharing ideas. You can
set up and save searches for new business ideas. Most search
sites will send you results by email or RSS feed.
Page 15

Whose idea was this?!
Becky McCray is an entrepreneur and rancher in a small
town in Oklahoma. She writes about small business and
rural issues at the Small Biz Survival website
(www.smallbizsurvival.com), based on her own success
and failures as a small town retail store owner, antiques
dealer, and consultant.

Becky is a frequent speaker on small town business and
rural entrepreneurship. Her special topics are social
media marketing and tourism.

She and Barry Moltz wrote the book Small Town Rules
about how all business must now face the conditions
much like a small town.
Also by Becky McCray
                                  Small Town Rules
                          Download a free sample from Small
                          Town Rules, and learn the epic
                         changes that make the global busi-
                         ness environment much more like a
                        small town.
                        More importantly, learn the rules that
                       successful small town business use to
                       survive in this connected economy.

“Small Town Rules is not an intellectual masterpiece of thought
that leaves you floating. Instead it’s a brass and tacks, bread
and butter, hammer and nail MANUAL for succeeding when
you’re small…It’s a survival guide for a solo entrepreneur who
wants to do big things or for the big company who needs to
continue to be and act small.”
             Ramon Ray, Small Biz Technology
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